Sep 26 2008
David Wallace
Hade ingen aning om vem han är/var, men hans bortgång gjorde att han togs upp på en mailinglista jag är med på, och där man samtidigt postade en av hans texter. Mycket tänkvärt.
Läs gärna.
Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address – May 21, 2005
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go
ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while
pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].)
Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class
of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen
to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says
“Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a
bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes
“What the hell is water?”
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the
deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"]
turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the
genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the
wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please
don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is
merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones
that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence,
of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the
day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a
life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry
and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m
supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to
explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value
instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most
pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a
liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with
knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you’re
like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to
feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you
how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college
this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m
going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be
insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking
that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the
capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too
obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and
water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the
value of the totally obvious.
Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys
sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the
guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing
about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after
about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I
don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I
haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just
last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard,
and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty
below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out
‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna
die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy
looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he
says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his
eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come
wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”
It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts
analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different
things to two different people, given those people’s two different
belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from
experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere
in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s
interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is
fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these
individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come
from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation
toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just
hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from
the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not
actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the
whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain
in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had
anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of
religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own
interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than
atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is
exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a
close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the
prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me
how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less
arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my
certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be
automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I
have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend
to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience
supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe;
the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely
think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s
so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It
is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think
about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the
absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of
YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR
monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be
communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent,
real.
Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about
compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is
not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of
somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default
setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see
and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can
adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as
being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental
term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is
how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual
knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the
most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own
case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff,
to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply
paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying
attention to what is going on inside me.
As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay
alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant
monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty
years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that
the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually
shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think
really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what
you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you
pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from
experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult
life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote
the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface,
actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit
coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always
shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the
truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they
pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your
liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going
through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead,
unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting
of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get
concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have
any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole,
large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in
commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and
petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too
well what I’m talking about.
By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get
up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar,
college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at
the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want
is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and
then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next
day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home.
You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job,
and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the
supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be:
very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and
when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of
course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also
try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit
and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty
much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and
quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s
confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver
your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with
carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long
ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now
it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s
the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which
is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on
the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose
daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us
here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you
pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice
that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy,
flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel
that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the
crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the
way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et
cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part
of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after
year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly
meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is
that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of
choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles
and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a
conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m
gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my
natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are
really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire
to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like
everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my
way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and
cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or
at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell
phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally
unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts
form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day
traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s
and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish,
forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the
patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the
biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest
[responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to
think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the
ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think
about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the
future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled
and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern
consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine.
Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and
automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default
setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring,
frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the
automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and
that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the
world’s priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to
think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these
vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of
these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past,
and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but
ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to
drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by
a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him,
and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger,
more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that
everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and
frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder,
more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that
I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects
you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and
effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it,
or you just flat out won’t want to.
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice,
you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up
lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not
usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding
the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very
lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just
yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape
problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course,
none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends
what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know
what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then
you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t
annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention,
then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within
your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type
situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same
force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of
all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing
that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to
see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how
to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and
what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to
day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.
There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only
choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe
choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it
JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four
Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that
pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you
worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in
life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s
the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will
always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a
million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all
know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs,
clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The
whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you
will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling
stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the
insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil
or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after
day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you
measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re
doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating
on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and
money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and
frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture
has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary
wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of
our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.
This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are
all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you
will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of
wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"].
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness
and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to
sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every
day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how
to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the
rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some
infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or
grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to
sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a
whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course,
free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it
as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is
really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of
life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost
nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple
awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in
plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding
ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in
the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand
cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a
lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.
/j
Virtualiseringen har gjort rejält intåg även hos astronomer. Nu har man länkat ihop paraboler från Hawaii, Arizona och Kalifornien till ett enda virtuellt teleskop som därmed kan se 1000 gånger tydligare än Hubble-teleskopet.